Wish I Hadn't Read That

E.J. Dionne, Jr. in WaPo is thin, cruel gruel after reading Mark Steyn's analysis of the anality in the Senate Chambers (see post below).

Dionne is holding onto a "no" vote as desperately as a Katrina survivor chest-deep in water clings to his looted TV. Unable to find anything wrong with John Robert's record, he's left to urge a "no" vote not because of anything the candidate said or did, but because there just ought to be a reason to cast a symbolic vote against Bush here somewhere.

Dionne can't quite bring himself to write, "I'm so pissed at Bush, I just can't think straight," so instead he writes:

But the doubts about Roberts have nothing to do with his good heart. The issue is the power about to be put in his hands and into the hands of President Bush's next appointee -- power both will enjoy for life.

So Dionne, like Biden, Schumer and the other hired guns, pretend they don't know what Roberts stands for, because despite their pallid efforts to Bork him, he instead Ginsburged them. Dionne thinks the argument is so compelling, he'll get all the Dems and even moderate Repubs on his side.

He thinks they'll stand with him and say in Bidenesque tones, "I love you, buddy, but I just don't think the President is smart enough to know what he's doing, so it's up to me, since even though I just a guy, I'm so much smarter, and everyone knows my heart, you know, so I've got to call you out at the plate." Of course, they'd go on for another 20 minutes to really capture the Biden spirit. Clueless Joe, as Steyn called him.

What's so ridiculous about Dionne's argument is that it's so transparent even his sister Celine "Maybe they've never touched a TV" Dion can figure it out, even if Dionne and friends must play out roles in a reverse emporer with no clothes -- Roberts has clothes, but they can't see them.

Of course Dionne knows what kind of judge Roberts would be. He doesn't neeed answers on the Senate floor or another 40,000 pages of old memos to know, as he surely does down to his deepest molecule, that John Roberts is no amigo of his beloved liberal policies. But admitting that he knows what everyone in the country knows would cost him is argument.

So he builds an intellectual fort and hopes other Senators will find comfort in its reed-thin walls. As Dennis Prager has said, it's a position so ridiculous only an intellectual could fall for it.